What’s the malware trend while what is the anti-malwares

It is fun to look forward to the year ahead and see if we can predict what may happen over the next 11 months with 2015 in the rear view mirror, i mean, what’s the malware trend while what is the anti-malware.

Vulnerabilities

2015 saw the discovery of major vulnerabilities such as Shellshock, POODLE and Heartbleed which affected OpenSSL software. Heartbleed OpenSSL encrypts traffic between a user’s computer and a web server (“https” sites). Logging in to an apparently secure web server that used the vulnerable OpenSSL package meant that encrypted traffic could potentially be intercepted and eventually decrypted. The vulnerability affected major sites like Yahoo!, Imgur and DuckDuckGo, amongst many others, although an update was released to patch the unsecure code.

Data Breaches

During 2015 the Identity Theft Resource Center recorded information on 761 data breaches across financial, business, educational, government and medical institutions (http://www.idtheftcenter.org/images/breach/ITRCBreachStatsReportSummary2…). Some of the more notorious events include the Sony hack, malware attacks on Staples, Dairy Queen, Michaels, Home Depot that resulted in the theft of credit and debit card details and email addresses.

Ransomware

Malware that extorts money from victims featured heavily this year. Tactics ranged from threatening but ‘harmless’ pop ups purporting to be from law enforcement agencies demanding fines, to the more malicious and damaging tactic of encrypting the victim’s files in an attempt to force users to pay to have the files returned, which should call the attention of all users to have a professional pc optimizer, like UPCleaner, to defend our computer from malware attack.

PUPs Bite Back

Some potentially unwanted programs (PUPs) turned the tables on anti-malware vendors this year by attempting to detect if certain anti-malware programs are present. This raises a question; why do some PUP installers collect and send this information to a remote server? To get a better offer or to download malware/adware that is not detected by this particular antivirus? Interestingly, this AV tracking methodology is used as a part of server-side polymorphism when a newly generated piece of polymorphic malware is checked using popular antiviruses to avoid being detected before delivery.

In a word, 2016 will be another year in which malware spreads further and by more ways, all PC utilizers should pay enough attention to internet security, have an web protection and keep privacy information online safe.